DAVID HOCKNEY A Bigger Picture
He’s a giant personality as well as a great artist.
Hockney’s so clever, so open, so warm, so wise, so experimental, so audacious, so modern.He has always embraced technology and what he’s done with the iPad is revolutionary.
Here he paints and draws with everything: ink, charcoal, watercolour, oil and iPad. Some of the most beautiful drawings are in charcoal.
It’s a stunning exhibition whose highlights include the wonderful Tunnel room, seasonal paintings of one small lane in Yorkshire, and the newest iPad paintings in the huge room that’s the climax of the show.
The best way to do the Hockney is to do what we did.
Book tickets for 10 a.m. and arrive at 9.40, get near the front of the queue, go in and do the last of the 13 rooms first, so you have the best room to yourself for a couple of minutes. That’s the biggest room and it has all the iPad paintings and they’re astounding when you see them all together.
Jan had been a few weeks ago with her painter friend Anna, and today we did what they did. After the big room, which we had to ourselves for those precious few minutes, we walked past the mini-theatre installation, where a videofilm plays constantly, to the room with his sketchbooks.
These are in glass display cabinets. Obviously, any sketchbook can only be open to show two pages. But here small digital screens show all the most interesting sketches and it’s fabulous to see inside the sketchbooks in this way.
Then we saw the exhibition in reverse order, so that it took an hour to get into the early rooms that were by then rammed with hundreds of people. We saw some early Yorkshire stuff and the Grand Canyon, where the reds are very, very intense.
And, finally, we sat down to watch the film, which is hypnotic and playful. It makes polite women gasp and say,”Wow!”
Multiple cameras capture the foliage and scenery in ways that are quite exquisite. If you do the exhibition that way, you’ll think, Blimey! The luscious real colours of the video are just like the paintings ! Real life is just like Hockney’s paintings!
We came out and it was a glorious day and we dived into Pret for a sandwich and then sat on a bench in Green Park for a while, enjoying the sunshine.
Three young people with small suitcases sat on the grass eating a takeaway lunch and a big pigeon fluffed his purple neck feathers for a lady pigeon and said, “Come on, you know you want me.” She walked away and he gave chase and then gave up.
I looked out at this timeless Spring scene in the world’s best city and saw grass, paths, people – and trees.
I said, “Every time I see a tree, I see a Hockney.”
Today’s our anniversary. We got married on 12/3/76.
“It should have shone like this when we got married,” said Jan.
“It’s shone ever since,” I quipped.
We walked up to Green Park tube and Jan went to her art class and I came home.